City People writer

PROFILE

Margaret Ann Moon wanted her children to have the benefits of a Catholic education, but she never imagined the long and acrobatic path that her dream would take.

Moon was one of nine founders of St. Joseph’s Catholic School, which opened 20 years ago last month in a small yellow house on Augusta Road. Just about every step of the process required them to step out in faith, Moon says.

Sometimes it was a baby step, other times, much larger steps were required.

She recalls the words of encouragement from a Baptist minister who told them that whether they elected to open the school then or a few years in the future, at some point they would have to make “the leap of faith.”

“I told him later, ‘You never told us that every day was going to be another leap of faith,’ ” says Moon, who served as chairman of the St. Joseph’s board for several years.

The founders faced all sorts of hurdles, from financial troubles to resistance from the diocese.

They started, she says, “with nothing more than $600 in the bank. My mother had given us $800, and we used $200 to do a newsletter. And we just prayed and prayed and prayed.”

St. Michael’s Lutheran Church gave them use of that yellow house for the first year, but they knew the space wouldn’t be adequate for very long. Later, Fourth Presbyterian gave St. Joe’s the use of the gym so students could take PE, and two Baptist churches also lent out their gyms to St. Joe’s, Moon says.

In 1994, the school moved to an office building on East Washington Street. It was available for $400,000, but Moon was a little nervous about signing the mortgage.

“My husband thought it was a great idea,” she says. “He was all about it because it would get us in a building that was big enough we could stay in it for a few years.”

He was proved right; the school remained there until 1997, and eventually the building sold for a 50-percent profit.

The first seven years were the toughest, she recalls, and several of the founders kept the school going by refinancing their homes or taking out home-equity loans.

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“Every day was a crisis of some sort, but we just kept praying and praying,” Moon says.

When one of the first headmasters resigned, Moon was in the middle of a difficult pregnancy with her fifth child. She says she didn’t know what else to do, so she went to church.

“We just knelt down and said, ‘God, tell us what to do because we don’t know how to keep this thing going.’ And we’d leave there, it would be OK, we’d work it out.”

Small miracles and large ones came through, which reinforced their conviction that they were doing the right thing, she says.

In 1997, the school moved to the current campus off Laurens Road, a building that once housed Amoco/Phillips Research and Distribution.

Twenty years ago, St. Joe’s opened with 13 ninth-graders, and its first graduating class numbered seven seniors, including Moon’s daughter, Allison.

Now, there are around 650 middle-school and high school students, among them Caitlin, Moon’s youngest daughter, who will graduate in the spring.

Over the years, St. Joe’s has raised money to provide financial aid for students who meet the academic requirements but can’t pay the tuition because, Moon says, they don’t want to turn anyone away for financial reasons.

For Moon, a Catholic education is important for several reasons.

“We wanted to teach our children, and this is what a Catholic education does, that you don’t leave your faith outside the voting box,” she says. “That whatever your faith is, you live it day in and day out. There’s not a time when you take it off and leave it on the shelf. And that’s one of the main things we wanted, a truly Catholic education where they would know their faith and live it.”

It’s gratifying to see how far the school has come since its humble beginnings, Moon says.

“I’m amazed. It has turned out to be so much more than we ever could have asked for.”

And while Moon has always had faith, she says the whole experience strengthened it in many ways.

“It’s been a remarkable thing to be a part of. The hardships we went through caused the Gospel to come alive. We would go to church and hear the Gospel, and the next week it was like, ‘Well, could I relate.’ It was like we were living the Gospel.”